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Forza Horizon 5 reviews – our roundup of the critics’ scores

Playground Games' latest has been a real hit with critics - here's what they made of it

A promo image from Forza Horizon 5 featuring a red sports car and two SUVs in the Mexican backdrop

Update – November 8, 2021: You can now check out our very own Forza Horizon 5 review! Catch the link below.

The big day approaches for racing game fans. Forza Horizon 5 launches on November 9, but ahead of that date we’ve now got a good idea of what’s headed our way. The Forza Horizon 5 reviews have begun rolling in, letting us know what’s on the near horizon (hah) and whether Playground Games’ latest will be worth your hard-earned pennies. So far, it seems the answer is a big, resounding ‘yes’.

Reviews for the upcoming PC game are positively glowing across the board. The racing game, which takes players to the “vibrant and ever-evolving open world landscapes of Mexico”, is sitting at a pretty stellar 91 on Metacritic across both PC and Xbox Series X, and 92 on Opencritic across all platforms. There are full marks among the critics’ scores, with plenty of reviews putting it very near the top end of the scale, too – so it sounds like it’s a not-to-miss for fans of the series and racing games more broadly.

In our Forza Horizon 5 review, Phil Iwaniuk scores the game a nine-out-of-ten, calling it, “familiar, excellent, and polished to a degree that hardly seems possible,” adding that, “if you love taking vintage Porsches for joyrides through environments that’d have a poet bawling then you’re going to be very happy here.”

Without further ado, here’s our roundup of the Forza Horizon 5 reviews:

Forza Horizon is available to pre-order on Steam and the Microsoft Store, and it’s also headed to Xbox Game Pass for PC on day one. If you’ve never signed up for Xbox Game Pass for PC then you can get the first month for £1.00 / $1.00, which then becomes £7.99 / $9.99 monthly – you can sign up to the subscription via that link.

We also spoke to the game’s creative director Mike Brown and technical art director Gareth Harwood about the importance of accessibility, how SSDs transformed the team’s design approach, and the technologies the development team has employed to make it as visually stunning as possible.